Reply #28: Those new petrochemical finds -- plus TWO Bonus Rants! [View All]

[Dogmudgeon]

They are uniformly small and poorly productive. The larger finds are the "deepwater" fields, oil fields that are under deep sea beds, and they would be extremely difficult (as in "extremely expensive") to produce.

Small-scale alternative energy development would go a long way to help keep people warm in the winter, but would do nothing to take the pressure off a world economic system dependent on oil and gas. So staying warm is actually a fairly small concern. In the long run, if the industrial system runs out of gas, we're effectively thrown back to 1851 -- but with 21st century needs and requirements. (We can keep the Internet, but we'll have to get by with 55 baud modems -- for broadband).

Coal and nuclear are the only viable sources of energy that will be available for powering the modern industrial system after oil's coming scarcity makes it unusable. Coal is horrendously dirty, and nuclear is still hobbled by a hundred dumb-ass problems (but see below). Nuclear energy, as it's now developed, is also on a limited schedule; without a recycling plan like some of the systems NNadir has described, easily-mined fissile material won't last fifty years, and far less with extensive nuke building.

But I don't blame the "No Nukes" movement for the nuclear paranoia as much as the nuke industry. I think they realized that they would have to put a lot more money and effort into their industry than they were prepared to invest, and decided to drop the project. There would be no instant profits, and most investors don't want to wait five or ten years to see profits. It became a simple process to stoke popular nuclear paranoia and leave their smaller investors holding an empty bag. They knew that in the future, they could always use Jackson Browne as the boogey man if they had to.

Of course, a mere billion-dollar investment in 1970 would be worth well over a trillion smackeroonies now, but that's an investment opportunity lost, like when I passed up on an opportunity in 1994 to buy stock in a company making penis pumps. But I digress. Compare this with the long-standing knowledge that the levees in New Orleans needed about $100 million of improvements. The federal government didn't want to make the investment, so now they have a potentially $200 billion disaster recovery to underwrite. A 2000-to-1 risk-to-investment ratio that they gambled on and lost. (Even a $50 billion loss is a 500-to-1 mistake.)

When the world's population of 7, 8, or even ten billion people are dependent on a system that suddenly can only support 750 million or 1.25 or 2 billion, you can guess what will happen. And it will probably only take three to five years. After the destruction of so much of the world's real wealth and (more to the point) living people, it will be impossible to just "bounce back".

A penny now, or a dollar tomorrow. How comforting to know that our leaders in business and government are looking out for our pennies.

The anti-nuclear faction is right, too, about the dangers of nuclear energy, but that's a part of the exact same calculation. It takes money to reduce the health risks of any technology, which is more investment the companies didn't want to make. And to re-initiate the nuclear program would require a radionucleide recycling program, which has never been developed on a large scale, which means even more long-term investment, risk ... and the possibility of lost careers. But the public is largely oblivious to the risks of coal and unaware that the cost of reducing those risks will be quite high.

Notice that our efforts in developing space have suffered from the same economic short-sightedness, although no catastrophe was attached (except for 14 hapless Shuttle riders and a three-member Soyuz crew). As we moved into the 1970s, financiers realized that it would take a lot more money and time to develop private projects in space, so they just quietly shelved their plans. Space, of course, is the best location for industry, and has a lot of potential for agriculture and, eventually, habitation. But the Gospel of "Greed-Is-Good" was being preached, and the great Capitalist Sawdust Trail led to quick bucks, Ronald Reagan, and the Yuppie way of life.

No expensive cars, no hanging out with movie stars and athletes, no fine clothes and trophy spouses. No special privileges, no legal lubrication for those lost cocaine weekends and firearms "accidents" and accidents of the cute kind that require monthly payments.

Well, then, fuck the world! Let them eat Rollerball!

Business has become allergic to the truly Big Projects that yield world-changing improvements in life and major increases in real wealth. Those require big investments, tolerance for tangible risk, the ability to be patient for several years or even decades, and the kind of visionary thinking that corporate minds do not have. The modern business critter wants to build empires not out of stone and wasteland and iron and glass, but out of broken lives, submissive prisoners, and stacks of fungible paper and ink (or toner).

The business community wants the State to underwrite all its risks, and then complains that it needs tax "relief"; it wants its governmental Nanny to keep its workforce and clientele in line, then agitates for "Free Enterprise". As a result, the only real large-scale technological advance we have made since the 1960s has been computer and information technology, because the advances have been made in a number of less-expensive steps. But building a durable and reduced-risk energy system, as well as developing space for human use, have proven too demanding for the past three generations of the Captains of Industry who covet their command more than their opportunity to master the seas. The sails remain fresh and crisp and white -- and unused. The slaves in the galley groan and suffer as their masters safely hug the coastline and kiss up to as many local officials as they can.

With such an attitude, the future New Worlds will continue to be Unknown Countries; no lamps will light unbuilt golden doors, the lightning will flash unharnassed across a frightened land, and though the Four Horsemen will come to the Old World, they will depart a dark, quiet planet.

--p!
It's what I can get away with -- while the heater still works.